Tuesday, 29 November 2016

The coconut crab (Birgus latro) can weigh up to 4 kilograms. It has enormous claws with which it can pick up objects that are seven times heavier that it is.

Recently, scientists measured the strength of this crab. While humans have a grip strength of 300 newtons on average, a coconut crab weighing 2 kilograms almost reached 1800 newtons. Hence, the researchers suggested that a fully-grown coconut crab “could thus be expected to exert a crushing force of more than 3000 newtons,” New Scientist says.

While the Darwinian explanation for the crab’s Hercules-like grip invokes dietary demands, just how many crabs passed away before evolution’s blind watchmaker finally thought of a solution and gave the poor crab a chance to have a coconut for lunch?

The mantis shrimp is another Hercules: it beats airplane frames in strength.

Creatures like these challenge evolutionary explanations. They strongly suggest that teleology or goal-orientation was involved. This happens to be Darwinian heresy.

Design is so evident everywhere that it is actually difficult to to avoid goal-orientation even in evolutionary stories.

Sunday, 27 November 2016

While Fidel Castro, who recently died at the age of 90, was an atheist, he obviously respected the teachings and deeds of Jesus Christ, even claiming that Jesus was a communist.

Why?

Jesus fed 5,000 men and asked a rich man to give his wealth to the poor.

When it comes to equality, communism shared some of the values of early Christianity, in principle, that is.

But Comrade Castro did not like all the teachings of the Bible. Jesus never taught that the Kingdom of God should be built by a sword (or an AK-47).

Castro's revolution led to wars in several Latin American and African countries, with millions of casualties and suffering for countless more people.

Sandinistas, Sendero Luminoso, FARC, and the anything but civil wars in Angola and Mozambique were all inspired by the Cuban revolutionary, and they brought death, suffering and misery to millions.

All attempts to build a secular paradise on Earth have failed miserably. While Castro might have succeeded in doing some good things (along with the bad), he definitely did not make the world a better place for most people within his sphere of influence.

In other words, Castro was a failed Messiah.

Only one Messiah ever succeeded.

And instead of taking others' lives, He chose to give His own, because the people He created had turned away from Him and He sought to bring them back.

It was the sin of the first humans that brought bad things into the world.

Jesus came to undo the damage. That is the real reason for the Christmas season.

Friday, 25 November 2016

Recently, New Scientist (NS) outlined five dilemmas that believers in solely naturalistic processes have to face when they consider astronomy.

For want of a better word, it calls them coincidences. And they are all over the place.

In naturalistic thinking, we can thank a quantum fluctuation for all the fine tuning that is evident in the universe.

One of the dilemmas is the uniform temperature of the universe. It is almost astounding. NS gives the gist of the problem:

”THE temperature of the cosmic microwave background – the radiation bathing all of space – is remarkably uniform. It varies by less than 0.001 degrees from a chilly 2.725 kelvin.”

For naturalists, it is indeed a huge mystery:

”But while that might seem natural enough, this consistency is a real puzzle. For two widely separated areas of the cosmos to reach thermal equilibrium, heat needs enough time to travel from one to the other. Even if this happens at the speed of light, the universe is just too young for this to have happened.”

This has led to an explanation that is anything but scientific:

”Cosmologists try to explain this uniformity using the hypothesis known as inflation. It replaces the simple idea of a big bang with one in which there was also a moment of exponential expansion. This sudden, faster-than-light increase in the size of the universe allows it to have started off smaller than an atom, when it would have had plenty of time to equalise its temperature.”

Then comes the great admission:

“''On the face of it, inflation is a totally bonkers idea – it replaces a coincidence with a completely nonsensical vision of what the early universe was like, ' says Andrew Pontzen at University College London.”

When they leave out intelligent causes, the resulting hypotheses are bonkers and completely nonsensical.

But obviously, they cannot allow a Divine foot in the door, as professor Richard Lewontin famously put it.

Source:

Clark, Stuart. 2016. Space is all the same temperature. Coincidence?New Scientist. (26 October).

Wednesday, 23 November 2016

Doubters often question the historicity of Noah’s Flood although many geological features testify that it was a real catastrophic event.

These monuments formed by the Flood can be seen all over the world, for instance in Cape Verde, Norway and Australia.

New research published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters suggests that there is a lot more water below Earth’s surface than we previously thought.

In addition to aquifers and water trapped in ringwoodite, it seems that our planet also hides an enormous subterranean lake below the Andes.

Jon Blundy of the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues discovered “a massive reservoir of water”.

According to New Scientist, they “made the discovery while studying a huge ‘anomaly’ 15 kilometres beneath the currently dormant Uturuncu volcano in the Bolivian Andes. The anomaly, called the Altiplano-Puna magma body, slows down seismic waves and conducts electricity, unlike surrounding magma.”

To say that the researchers were surprised would probably be an understatement. Blundy and colleagues tested rocks excavated from the mountain and found that they contained 8 to 10 per cent water:

“The Altiplano-Puna magma body is known to be around half a million cubic kilometres in volume, so the researchers estimate it must contain a similar amount of water to some of the largest freshwater lakes on Earth. ‘It’s probably somewhere between Lake Superior and Lake Huron,’ says Blundy. ‘It’s a staggeringly large amount.’ ”

Lack of water is thus not a valid excuse for doubting the Flood.

The discovery also supports the view that there was subterranean water on Earth from the very beginning.

Monday, 21 November 2016

Political correctness is no friend of Christianity. The latest proof of this comes from the US city of Bloomington in Indiana that has renamed Good Friday as Spring Holiday.

It also changed the name of Columbus Day to Fall Holiday.

The pretext was to make these days more inclusive. Mayor John Hamilton said this would "better reflect cultural sensitivity in the workplace".

Liberal views prevail in the city of 84,067 where 58.6% of the electorate chose to give their vote to Hillary Clinton in the recent presidential election.

Good Friday is the most important day of the year for Christians, as it marks the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. He died for the sins of the entire world, so very few things could possible be more inclusive.

However, as the Christmas wars and battles over crucifixes, religious statues and crosses have shown, many people seem to hate anything that reminds them of Christ or the Bible (including creation and Noah’s Ark and the Flood).

Nonetheless, the gospel of Jesus Christ is still the good news that gives hope to the hopeless, direction for those who are lost and new life to those who struggle and are desperate.

Source:

BBC News. 2016. Good Friday and Columbus Day renamed by 'inclusive' US city of Bloomington. (20 November).

Engineers and planners could learn a thing or two about the efficacy of plant cells. A paper published in the journal Current Biology reveals how the tiny factories in cells work as effectively as they do.

The research focused on the largest factory in a plant cell, the endoplasmic reticulum.

An article in Science Daily summarises the findings:

“Michigan State University researchers in Federica Brandizzi's lab, for the first time, have identified how plants' largest cell factory moves to maintain vital functions, which could lead to advances in improving plant cells' critical functions and growing better crops.”

It seems that the more we learn about cells, the less credible any Darwinian explanation becomes. Cells are designed to carry out things, and what they do, they do extremely well, smoothly and efficiently:

“ ‘Healthy cells operate as smoothly as the best Minecraft city imaginable,’ said Federica Brandizzi, MSU Foundation Professor of plant biology. ‘The miniature cities are fully equipped with all of the facilities, or organelles, that are necessary for a smooth-running operation.’ ”

It does not sound like the efforts of the blind watchmaker at all:

“Administration center, factories and even recycling centers are all there, running at 100-percent efficiency. In contrast to the infrastructures and city buildings in cells, however, the organelles, are not built on static foundations. They are huge, mobile cellular cargos that travel rapidly to reach resources and deliver products.”

Intelligent design in nature is obvious. We see it in plants, animals and even ourselves. Just think about two tiny molecular motors, i.e., dynein and kinesin, that bear all the hallmarks of supernatural intelligence.

Thursday, 17 November 2016

Some scientists have a strong bias against the supernatural. This became obvious during the recent Royal Society meeting New Trends in Evolutionary Biology. They were unwilling to accept real design even though evolutionary explanations do not work.

While Neo-Darwinian mechanisms cannot explain nanomachines or the other intricate features of the cell, for instance, participants were unwilling to acknowledge that genuine design is the one and only credible explanation of the wonderful integrated systems in biology.

This same bias is also seen in the attempt to create life in the lab.

The goal is to “prove pretty decisively that life is nothing more than a complicated chemical system” as Mark Bedau, a philosopher of science at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, puts it in a recent article in New Scientist.

But chemicals don’t turn into life.

Geneticists have made some remarkable breakthroughs. They have removed the DNA of a microbe and replaced it with the genome of another microbe.

That is a far cry from creating life.

Instead of modifying existing organisms, their real quest is to make life from scratch:

“A more ambitious effort starts with nonliving, chemical ingredients – sometimes familiar nucleic acids and lipids, but sometimes radically different structures such as self-assembling metal oxides. The researchers aim to coax these chemicals across the Darwinian threshold where they begin to replicate themselves heritably and evolve – the key criteria for calling the system alive. If this can be achieved, the implications would be enormous.”

They seem to be blind to the enormous amount of intelligent designing they are putting in their effort. Whereas the Darwinian watchmaker is absolutely blind, the attempt to make synthetic life is clearly teleological.

It has an explicit goal, and that is something that Darwinian processes cannot have. So, ironically, if they do manage to create synthetic life, they will simply prove that intelligent design works.

We shouldn’t forget that the naturalistic origin of life is wrought with severe problems.

Darwinians have suggested many solutions, such as water world, molecular midwives, RNA world etc., but they all require many lucky turns of events and none of them works.

Moreover, complexity does not increase gradually and spontaneously.

Source:

Holmes, Bob. 2016. The world in 2076: Human-made life forms walk the earth. New Scientist (16 November).

Tuesday, 15 November 2016

If woodpeckers were to get them, “presumably they wouldn’t be around for very long" was National Geography’s (NS) answer to its Weird Animal Question of the Week.

Woodpeckers peck wood for several reasons, for instance “to excavate nest cavities, dig for insects or sap, or create holes to store food.” And they do bang hard.

The short answer, according to Richard Prum, an evolutionary ornithologist at Yale University, is “good evolutionary design.”

'Evolutionary design' is an oxymoron, as evolution does not plan or design. Natural selection is supposed to use available bits and pieces to put together what it can.

The long answer is a bit more complicated. NS mentions that woodpeckers have 1) tiny brains (2 grams or 0.07 oz.), meaning less risk of injury, 2) very brief impact time (0.5–1 millisecond), 3) their skull structure prevents injury (dense bone outside; porous inside), 4) their brains fit snugly into skulls, “preventing the organ from banging around”, 5) the orientation of the brain “creates more surface area to absorb … exacting blows” and 6) “ the hyoid apparatus, a bone-and-muscle structure that wraps around a woodpecker's skull, also keeps the brain safe.”

In his book Creation: Facts of Life, Dr. Gary Parker points out that the woodpecker is a “marvel of interdependent parts or ‘compound traits’ – traits that depend on one another for any to have functional value.”

Dr. Parker suggests that the Darwinian trial-and-error approach would have led to the extinction of woodpeckers. If their wonderful apparatus had not been in place at the start, they would have died off.

NS acknowledges that woodpeckers are amazing creatures: “The woodpecker’s capacity to absorb blows has even inspired a system to reduce concussions in sports such as [American rules] football.”

The brains of all creatures bear signs of top-down planning, which is the very opposite of the Darwinian approach. Yet evolutionists tend to be slow to admit this ubiquitous fact.

Sunday, 13 November 2016

When a Brazilian free-tailed bat breaks all records by flying at 160 kilometres an hour (100 m.p.h.), there might be more to the story than simply saying that bats are “well adapted to their aerial lifestyle, with long, angular, narrow wings,” as New Scientist puts it.

Of course they are. But such agility is best explained by design.

All creatures that fly are amazing testimonies of creation. A Darwinian trial-and-error approach could hardly produce amazingly effective fliers.

Even evolutionists will acknowledge that bats have been amazing creatures for a very long time. In 2010 a paper in Nature suggested that the earliest bat Onychonycteris finneyi, dated at “52 million years," could probably echolocate.

Gary McCracken of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and his colleagues “used an airplane tracking device on seven bats from the Frio Bat Cave in south-western Texas to track ground distance covered by bats.”

While they cannot be absolutely sure whether tailwinds or gravity might have helped the bats to beat records, they believe that the wind was weak during the night they measured their speeds.

Other flying creatures have amazing abilities, as well.

Birds are no less amazing. Robins, hummingbirds, toucans, cockatoos and bowerbirds display many signs of very intelligent design that cannot be explained away by evolutionary storytelling.

Hardly a week goes by without the discovery of soft tissue in fossils assumed to be tens if not hundreds of millions years old.

Soft tissue has been found in many kinds of creatures, for instance salamanders, dinosaurs, marine creatures (read more here and here), birds (read more here and here), in a “520 million year” old Cambrian creature and microfossils assumed to be 1.88 billion years old.

The latest instalment features an emu-sized dinosaur dubbed Citipati osmolskae found in Mongolia, assumed to be 75 million years old.

Phys.org gives some background facts and a brief summary of a paper published recently in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B:

The dinosaur was “preserved while brooding its eggs, also preserved the original keratinous claw sheath that covered its digits… In 1995, a particularly well-preserved specimen of Citipati was recovered from the Djadokhta formation. The specimen was found in a brooding position on a nest of eggs. Paleontologists theorized that it was rapidly buried by a sand dune, which explained its excellent preservation.”

While preparing the specimen, researchers at the North Carolina State University

“noticed that there was a thin lens of white material extending beyond one of the bony claws on a forelimb that differed in texture and color from both the sediment and the bone. It was also located where a claw sheath would be.”

The Phys.org writer could not resist bringing up the assumed dino-to-bird connection:

“In modern birds, claw sheaths cover the claw at the end of a digit much like fingernails in humans and serve a number of functions - aiding them in defense, movement, or catching and holding prey. The sheaths in modern birds are composed of two types of keratin: alpha-keratin, the softer form found on the interior of the sheath; and beta-keratin, a harder and more durable keratin that comprises the sheath's exterior.”

We might perhaps wonder whether this change of focus has to do with the enigma of preserving original proteins for 75 million years.

Now they suggest that calcium did the trick. But the evidence is very flimsy indeed.

Looks like it’s high time to throw the millions of years dogma overboard.

Source:

Original dinosaur claw sheath proteins preserved for 75 million years. Phys.org. 8 November 2016.

Wednesday, 9 November 2016

For Charles Darwin, the origin of flowering plants was an abominable mystery. Why would the blind watchmaker produce so much beauty?

And they are not only beautiful but they are also amazingly smart and know how to communicate and co-operate with other plants.

Some plants might be able to count.

Plants have tiny but highly efficient factories called chloroplasts that convert sunlight into chemical energy.

Scientists used to think that this conversion happened more or less passively. However, new research published in the journal Nature Plants suggests that plants play a more active role in it.

A brief article in Science explains that British scientists have

“discovered a species of shade-dwelling begonia called Begonia pavonina … that arranges light absorbing components in its leaves to boost their light absorption.”

While “typical chloroplasts contain membrane-bound compartments called thylakoids that stack atop one another in a somewhat haphazard arrangement,” this flowering plant did it in a more sophisticated way:

“In B. pavonina, however, this stacking is far more regular, creating what are known as photonic crystals. These crystalline arrays strongly reflect blue light, giving the leaves an iridescent glow. But more importantly, they concentrate the more abundant green and red wavelengths of light on the leaves’ energy absorbing apparatus. The upshot is that B. pavonina’s leaves soak up as much as 10% more energy than other low-lying forest dwellers. That may not seem like much, but under the thick canopies of Malaysian forests where B. pavonina lives, that extra energy gives the plant the juice it needs to edge out its competitors.”

The take away message is that these flowers are far too clever to be the products of an entirely blind watchmaker. They are beautiful, they are intelligent, and they are designed.

Monday, 7 November 2016

New research has shown that bonobos (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzees (P. troglodytes) share one per cent of their genes. This, actually, is no news, as before the 1930s bonobos were categorised as a chimpanzee subspecies. They used to be called pygmy chimps.

Christina Hvilsom, a conservation geneticist at the Copenhagen Zoo, and colleagues compared the genomes of 75 chimps and bonobos and discovered traces of interbreeding.

An article in Science suggests that this prompted them to think that the interbreeding occurred at two different stages: First, “1.5 million years” ago “bonobo ancestors mixed with the ancestor of the eastern and central chimps.” Then, “200,000 years ago, central chimps got another boost of bonobo genes.”

The researchers make much of gene flow between species. The article mentions that humans have a sizable amount of Neanderthal DNA and that coyotes, dogs and wolves also share genes.

From a Genesis perspective, this was expected. Neanderthals were fully human, and the dog kind has much more variety than early evolutionists could have imagined.

The fixity of species is a Darwinian myth.

The Biblical term 'kind' does not equal the biological concept 'species'. Living beings reproduce after their kinds, not species.

While we might see speciation happening (i.e. new species appearing), no one has ever witnessed a new kind being born.

We see all kinds of hybrids, such as ligers, zonkeys, geeps, wholpins, grolars and savannah cats, for instance.

This shows that animals reproduce after their kinds, not after their species. In other words, Moses was right and Darwin wrong – very much so.

Saturday, 5 November 2016

Interpreting and dating fossils is an intriguing game. In 1990 J. Shreeve wrote in Discover magazine: ”Everybody knows fossils are fickle; bones will sing any song you want to hear.”

This, of course, pertains to hominins, i.e. us and our assumed more or less ape-like ancestors, as well as to all fossils.

In 2015, David Martill at the University of Portsmouth, UK, and colleagues published a paper in Science on an assumed transitional form.

The four-footed snake Tetrapodophis amplectus was found by a private collector in Brazil and brought to Germany. It was tiny: its skull measured a centimetre and its overall length was 20 centimetres (8 inches).

Assumed to be 108 million years old, it had four little legs and looked liked the transitional form evolutionists were hoping to find.

Last week, at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) another research team came up with a very different kind of interpretation of the fossil. They proposed that it was a marine lizard.

An article in Science states:

“Vertebrate paleontologist Michael Caldwell of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and colleagues presented their own observations of the specimen, rebutting Martill’s paper point by point to a standing-room-only crowd.”

It seems that the 2015 paper had overlooked some very pertinent details:

“The new analysis hinges on the ‘counterpart’ to the original fossil, which was also housed in the Bürgermeister-Müller Museum in Solnhofen, Germany. When the slab of rock containing the fossil was cracked open, the body of the organism stayed mostly in one half of the slab, whereas the skull was mostly in the other half, paired with a mold or impression of the body. This counterpart slab, Caldwell says, preserved clearer details of the skull in particular. In his group’s analysis of the counterpart, he says, ‘every single character that was identified in the original manuscript as being diagnostic of a snake was either not the case or not observable.’ ”

Caldwell and colleagues made a convincing case that Tetrapodophis was not a snake at all:

“For example, in snake skulls, a bone called the quadrate is elongated, which allows snakes to open their jaws very wide. This fossil’s quadrate bone is more C-shaped, and it surrounds the animal’s hearing apparatus—a ‘characteristic feature’ of a group of lizards called squamates, says co-author Robert Reisz, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga, Canada. He and Caldwell add that although the fossil has more vertebrae in its body than in its tail, the tail isn’t short, but longer than that of many living lizards. They are working on a paper arguing that the fossil is probably a dolichosaur, an extinct genus of marine lizard.”

This is not the first time a supposed transitional form turns out to not conform to Darwinian expectations.

Recent years have witnessed increasing doubts about Ardi or Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecus sediba,H. naledi and Nutcracker Man or Paranthropus boisei.

And we also had an infamous episode featuring Ida or Darwinius massillae.

Thursday, 3 November 2016

Hongshanornis longicresta supposedly lived 124 million years ago, yet looks like a modern bird. Image courtesy of Chiappe et al. 2014. A new specimen of the Early Cretaceous bird Hongshanornis longicresta: insights into the aerodynamics and diet of a basal ornithuromorph. PeerJ 2:e234, Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0).

Joel Kontinen

Dino-era birds were real birds much earlier than evolutionists once thought. A fossil and other remains of a “120 million year old” bird found in China included a pellet that was full of fish bones.

Here’s the gist of the story, courtesy of Science Daily:

“About 120 million years ago, a bird dunked its beak into the water, caught a fish and, after digesting the meal, coughed up a pellet full of fish bones. The bird died moments later, but now its fossils are the oldest evidence of a bird pellet on record, a new study reported.”

The discovery suggests that at least some birds have had very modern bird-like traits and habits for far longer than researchers previously thought:

“The pellet — the first that is unambiguously from a bird that lived during the Mesozoic, the age of the dinosaurs — indicates that the ancient bird had a two-chambered stomach, much like birds do today, the researchers said.

Modern-day birds, including many birds of prey, produce pellets made up of indigestible material, such as bones, hair and feathers.”

Several other studies likewise corroborate the non-evolution of birds. For instance, a “130-million-year-old” wading bird looks very modern. Bird feathers haven’t evolved in ”100 million years,” wings trapped in amber suggest.

At least some ancient birds “performed aerodynamic feats in a fashion similar to those of many living birds,” Science Daily suggested in 2015.

It seems that the dino-to-bird hypothesis is in big trouble. (Read more here and here.)

Tuesday, 1 November 2016

Here’s one of the recent impact craters. Image courtesy of NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.

Joel Kontinen

The Moon’s origin is a naturalistic mystery. Now it seems that its age is also a dilemma for those who subscribe to billions of years.

In the past 7 years, meteorites have bombarded the Moon far more frequently than scientists previously thought. Recently, Nature published a paper by Emerson Speyerer, at Arizona State University in Tempe, and colleagues.

They compared older and more recent pictures taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and found at least 222 new impact craters.

This has far-reaching consequences. A Nature News article explains:

“Planetary geologists will also need to rethink their understanding of the age of the lunar surface, which depends on counting craters and estimating how long the terrain has been pummelled by impacts.”

On Space.com, Charles Choi brings up more surprises:

“The scientists also found broad zones around these new craters that they interpreted as the remains of jets of debris following impacts. They estimated this secondary cratering process is churning the top 0.8 inches (2 centimeters) of lunar dirt, or regolith, across the entire lunar surface more than 100 times faster than thought.”

" ‘I'm excited by the fact that we can see the regolith evolve and churn — a process that was believed to take hundreds of thousands to millions of years to occur — in images acquired over the past several years,’ Speyerer told Space.com.”

While believers in millions of years still think that only the Moon’s surface is young, they might well be mistaken. Time and again, planetary scientists are surprised at what they see: almost all planets, moons, and comets – and even Saturn’s rings – look a lot younger than they should in a solar system that they believe is “4.6 billion years” old.